macdjord

You could always just turn on the Infinite EVA Fuel cheat.

Map Mode: Ambient Lighting: I'm actually opposed to an ambient lighting slider in flight mode. Space should be dark, if the sun is blocked; it makes a good and sensible gameplay restriction, too: if you want to do nighttime docking, you have to remember to bring docking lights, and if you choose to land on the night side of a plenet, you have to live with not being able to see the terrain on your way down. Map mode, on the other hand, is supposed to be, well, a map. It should have enough ambient light that you can see the features of the night side of a planet. The KSC doesn't move, so why should I have to wait for daylight there in order to target my reentry? Map element controls: Interacting with map elements, though much improved from earlier versions, is still very awkward. The fundamental problem is the way SQUAD has overloaded a single control, namely left-click. With the exception of double-clicking on things to focus on them, everything in map view is done with unmodified single left-click. Adding a maneuver node? Left-click on your orbit. Opening a maneuver node? Left-click on it. Closing a maneuver node? Left-click off it. Selecting another craft, to target or control? Left-click it's orbit. Locking a numeric display element (e.g. apoapsis hight)? Hover to bring it up, then left-click on it. Given how busy the map screen is, these elements often overlap, and since they all use the same single interaction, they conflict. SQUAD desperately needs to revamp these controls, and assign some of these functions to other interactions, e.g. right-click, shift-click, and alt-click. [*]Flight Controls: RCS Translation Controls Always On: The RCS translation controls should always work, even when the RCS toggle is off. The RCS toggle makes sense for attitude control, where there is a single set of rotation keys, and you need to be able to choose whether to use RCS or to only use reaction wheels. However, the translation keys are dedicated controls; they do nothing else. There's no reason to make them dependent on the RCS toggle to function. Quick Staging Option: The minimum delay between stagings is a good thing, since it prevent accidentally dumping two stages when you meant to fire only one. But there should be a way to fire multiple stages quickly if you need to (e.g. in a low-altitude abort, after using the abort action group to decouple your capsule and fire the LES, you need to quickly stage through all the lifter stages in order to fire your capsule parachutes). My suggestion would be Alt-Space, to 'force-stage' the same way Alt-Period is 'force-physical-timewarp'. [*]Game Controls: Quicksave Delay: Accidentally hitting quicksave after things have gone wrong can be just as bad as accidentally hitting quickload when everything is fine. The quicksave key should have the same press-and-hold safety feature that quickload already does UnQuickload: I'm sure everyone has had the horrible experience of hitting quickload after a mistake, only to discover the quicksave is old and they've lost a ton of work. My suggestion is that, whenever you hit quickload, the game first saves a snapshot of the situation you are in. Then, if you decide you'd rather deal with your mistake than lose that much work, you can hit another key to reload that snapshot and go back to where you quickloaded from. This suggestion would replace @Bessy 's suggestion of warning about how far you are going back before you go, and is superior because a) depending on the mission, one in-game day can be anywhere from 10 seconds to 10 hours of playtime, so it doesn't make a good limit, and forcing the player to check the undo time and confirm they want to go back would defeat the purpose of quicksave. Force High Orbital Timewarp: Like @madadam, I think we should be able to use higher timewarps when in low orbit, so long as the orbit is stable (important note: the 'stability' requirement has to include checking that your orbit does not cross the SOI of a moon as well as that it doesn't intersect the atmosphere). I would like to expand that suggestion by proposing that the current limits remain in effect, but that you be able to override them by pressing Alt-Period, the same way you can force physical timewarp. Preserve the Revert Option: I recently lost Valentina to a physics glitch. After safely landing my first suborbital flight to space, she jumped from the command pod to get a surface EVA report for the biome she landed in. However, on hitting the ground, she ragdolled, skidded for a bit, then spontaneously exploded. Okay, that happens; that's why I'm not playing ironman. So I hit 'revert to launch'. However, while loading the launchpad, KSP froze, and I had to kill it. And when I restarted it, I found that the revert hadn't gone through: Val was still dead, and my revert option was gone. That shouldn't happen! There's no good reason to lose the revert option when you switch vessels, or return to the KSC, or quickload, or exit the game. Once a launch revert point is created, there's no reason it should be lost until you launch another vessel. (Exception: If you quickload to a point before the launch, then of course you lose the option to 'revert' to something that hasn't happened yet. But even then, the revert point shouldn't be thrown away immediately, in case the player uses the 'UnQuickload' option I suggested above.) [*]VAB: Add/remove Actions in Staging: You should be able to add actions that are normally triggered by action groups to the staging diagram, or remove actions that are staged by default entirely: Decouplers, solid rockets, or parachutes that are part of your abort system and don't get fired at all in normal flight can be removed from the staging diagram so they don't get triggered accidentally If your ship carries probes attached to decouplers and you intend to trigger them manually, you can remove them to avoid clutter Using a docking node as a decoupler? Add the 'decouple' action to your staging instead of having to trigger it with an action group Deploy solar panels or antennae at the appropriate point in your launch sequence by adding them to a stage Not sure exactly which stage you'll be on when you want to ditch those fairings? Remove them from the stack entirely and trigger them with an action group instead. Add science experiments to the staging stack to trigger them at the appropriate points in ascent or descent without having to remember to fire an action group [*]Duplicate-Place Parts: Hold alt while placing a part to add it to the craft while keeping a copy in your hand (same way you can currently alt-click to pick up a copy of a part while leaving the original where it is). This would make things like tiling a surface with solar panels much faster; instead of 'pick up solar panel, place, alt-click panel you just placed, place next...', you just go 'pick up solar panel, alt-click to place, alt-click to place, alt-click to place...'. [*]Aligned Struts & Fuel Pipes: @MachXXV's Editor Extensions plugin add the ability to snap struts and fuel pipes so they are exactly straight and perpendicular to their origin. This means you can use them between a radially attached part and the central body without causing the radial part to twist and create spin. This needs to be stock. [*]Radial+Lateral Symmetry: When surface-attaching to a part that is itself part of a radial symmetry group, add an option to mirror whatever you're attaching across the parent part as well as duplicating it on the other copies of the parent. So, for example, assume you have a rocket with a large core and a pair of radial boosters (o-O-o), and you want to add some winglets, set at 45 degrees and attacked to the boosters. You add the first winglet to one of the boosters, and it gets duplicated to the other (\o-O-o\). Then you add the second. But because you did that manually, they aren't necessarily at quite the same height, or exactly the same angle, which means your rocket tends to spin. However, with this option, the first winglet would be mirrored across the booster as well as to the other boost (>o-O-o<), maintaining perfect symmetry. [*]Force-Add Locked Parts: Ever find yourself working on a design, deciding to use a part, paying the unlock fee, then finding it doesn't fit like you'd hoped and you end up not using it at all? What I'd like is the option to add parts to my design that I haven't actually unlocked yet. I wouldn't be able to use the design, same as you can't use a design containing an experimental part after completing the contract that gave you access to the part. But I'd be able to play around with the design, check sizes and weights and delta-v, then only pay for the parts I actually need. [*]Abort Action Always: Tying the availability of action groups to the VAB upgrades is a neat gameplay mechanic, but it presents a problem for those playing in hard-core mode during the early- to mid-game: it is impossible to design an effective launch escape system without at least one action group. This is especially important given the new drag modelling; it's far too easy to create a design that flips out mid-launch for no apparent reason. I therefore propose that the abort action (and only the abort action) be available from the start, but only for manned launches. [*]Tweakable Consistency: Anything that can be set or tweaked in flight should be possible to do in the VAB. This includes: deploying solar panels, activating or deactivating fuel crossfeed, opening shielded or inline docking ports, activating or deactivating reaction wheels. [*]Tweakable Chute Deployment Speed: Chute deployment time should be adjustable. A chute used for a LES must open quickly, because you might only be 100m up in the first place. [*]Tweak Precision: The sliders are a good way of tweaking values to start with, but sometime you need precision; there needs to be an option to type in an exact value. This would also allow you to set the slider limits to cover the typical range, while not preventing people from using exceptional values when they need to. (There also needs to be a similar system for resource transfer.) [*]Parts: Eliminate the false distinction between LF and LFO tanks. Now that NERVA engines only burn LF, we need efficient ways of transporting it, but most of the LF-only tanks are only really suited for aircraft, and the LFO tanks are horribly inefficient when you're wasting half their capacity. Either add LF versions of all the 1.25 and 2.5 m tanks which hold twice as much LF but no O, or, better, make it so the existing LFO tanks can be tweaked between these two modes in the VAB. There are a number of gaping holes in the stock parts list - things that logically should exist, but don't, like an LES tower sized for the one-kerb capsule, or 0.625m and radial-mount drogue chutes. I consider these QoL issues, rather than suggestions, because they are not new ideas, but rather things that a player would expect to find and has to work around the absence of. This is a tentative list: 0.625m fuel tanks in the standard sequence (i.e. 4 tanks, each twice as long and with twice the capacity of the previous one, with the largest having the same capacity as the smallest 1.25m tank) An LES scaled for the one-kerb capsule A 0.65m version of the BZ-52 Radial Attachment Point 0.625m and radial-mount drogue chutes 3.75m stack separator Low-profile 3.75m-2.5m adapter (like the FL-A5 1.25m-0.625m adapter) Shielded Clamp-o-tron Sr. and Jr. docking ports

:-/ They should be following an inverse-square curve.

They've always done that.

'Stuff done in an old version', no. 'Stuff done in Brotoro's endless persistent world, regardless of version', on the other hand...

Yay! Update!

@Brotoro: The incorrect biome readout is probably because you were right on the edge of two biomes. If I understand correctly, the biome map you're looking at there doesn't just label the biomes, it defines them: when the game needs to determine what biome you are in, it looks at that map (or rather the .gif from which that map is generated), finds your current coordinates, and checks what colour that point is. However, the .gif has a finite resolution; if you're right at the boundary between two biomes, the game ends up picking up both adjacent pixels and averaging them, and sometimes the average colour ends up being neither of the two biomes in question.

Blood will not boil inside you even in hard vacuum; your veins provide enough pressure to keep it liquid. Outside you body, it would boil on Duna.

@dtobi, @Firov: Can we get some more conditionals? In particular, I'd like to be able to trigger on velocity, atmosphere pressure, and accelerometer reading.

Given the Bechdel test requires a conversation, I don't think any cover could possibly pass, except maybe comic book covers.

By the way, in case anyone missed it, Brotoro recently posted an update to Exiting Eve.

Heh. Neat timing, Brotoro: just yesterday, I went and made sure all your old threads, including this one, were on my subscription list. One day sooner and I might have missed this update~

Could always just keep running in 0.25 or whatever.

Oh, I'm not exited. I just always talk like this.

Yes. Stupid minimum character limit.

He's not playing in Career mode. The 'savings' he's talking about are purely theoretical. He designs his ships such that the boosters could be recovered if the game followed them down - but when he actually does his launches, the game despawns them and he just pretends they were recovered.

So, was I the only one going 'Range safety... range safety..? Where's the *bleep*ing range safety?!?'

Especially when it gets out that he has a history of naming planetary features after girlfriends~? Plus, I'm sure he got plenty of kisses on the cheek from girls who thought it was plenty sweet of him to do that for them - even if their lives had moved on to much to 'thank him properly'.

Trans-lunar injection burn for the Apollo launch required "3.05 to 3.25 km/s (10,000 to 10,600 ft/s) of delta-v, at which point the spacecraft was traveling at approximately 10.4 km/s (34150 ft/s) relative to the Earth." (emphasis mine); I presume that's what they're talking about.

Brotoro, I've started a thread about reminiscing about foibles and accomplishments in KSP versions past, and I thought (hoped) you might want to chime in - I know at least a couple of the issues I mentioned in my OP are things you've experienced not just 'in the past' but in this very save-file (you highlighted the vanishing of the launch tower yourself with those 'before and after' shots, and I remember the iteration of the Nuclear Tug that had a dozen OCTO2 probes mounted on the top to provide torque because SAS unit torque was only available to the SAS system).

I remember... ... the funky optimal launch trajectories you got when the atmosphere just stopped dead at 34.5km up... and the incredible feeling of freedom when you crossed the boundary and air resistance went away all at once. ... estimating my current throttle setting and acceleration by averaging the .... the first time I landed a Kerbal on the Mun and returned him safely to Kerbin. I had a video tutorial I followed slavishly (can't find it any more to link it, alas). The launch vehicle consisted of a launch stage of 9 liquid-fuel stacks hanging from 3 radially-mounted tricouplers (using SRBs for the radial mounting, since you couldn't radially mount fuel tanks for some reason - and, of course, you fired those SRBs right through the tricouplers at launch for a bit of extra power, because thrust impingement hadn't been invented yet), a single multi-tank liquid stack for TMI (point at 90 and burn at mun-rise!), insertion (thank god the master throttle cutoff worked in map view, even if the main throttle controls didn't), and early braking (deceleration burns at 30km, 8km, and 2km), and a minimal final stage - chute, capsule, decouple, tank, engine - for landing (don'ttipoverdon'ttipoverdon'ttipover) and return. ... when control fins were introduced; nobody cared about their atmosphereic steering authority - they made the best landing legs ever! ... my first Saturn V mod. The author had designed it based off the real Saturn V's stats (mass, size, thrust... and delta-v), which made it sliiiightly overpowered for the Kerbin system. (You couldn't quite make it all the way to the Mun on the first stage...) ... fixing said mod after the Great Texture Format Rejigger turned it various odd shades of red. ... my scream of frustration when I first found a mod which promised to allow you to use the control authority of SAS units for manual rotation - and realized that this meant that stock didn't do this, and I had spent years slapping dozens of useless SAS modules on my large ships in the hopes of getting them to turn less glacially. ... the first time I used MechJeb, and let the computer do the things computers are good at while I concentrated on the rocket science. (And docking. It did not do docking back then, though the PAR- ASAS button helped a lot.) ... persistence. You could put a ship in orbit, and another craft could rendezvous with it later - you couldn't dock, you couldn't transfer fuel, you couldn't even EVA a Kerbal over, but by god that first ship would still be there! ... desperately jamming the staging button, trying to get my capsule detached and its parachute deployed before my tumbling rockets hit the ground. (Actually, that still happens, every time I set up my Abort group. ,) ... mourning the loss of the launch tower; it wasn't like I ever built ships so big it interfered with them, and it looked so cool and Apollo-like. ... my first Scott Manley video.

Wooo! New mission!

... are you trying to build a Final Fantasy airship?

Huh. That's a new one. You Will Go To Space Today.

You'd also need a decouple for each one. Plus the mothership would need enough fuel to travel about the Joolian system and rendezvous with each satellite individually.